Much of the ahead-of-the-curve, aspirational tech stack posts featured on HN are the blogging equivalent of Instagram-polished shots. On a personal blog they're equal parts self-expression and self-promotion; on a company blog they're equal parts deep dive and recruitment teaser. It's okay. Some readers will feel intrigue, some confusion, some envy. They'll wonder why they can't use those new tools at their work.
It's nice to recognize there exist developers who seem to stand apart from the vocal ones who make these posts, but they're not a single class. Some brag just as much, just in different circles. Some don't brag, but they do lots of good work. Some put out work that's not so good, and they may or may seek to represent their accomplishment regardless. The only factor they clearly share is their underrepresentation and their lack of attained popularity in talking about their work on social media.
As tempting as it may be, it's a big reach to conclude due to their underrepresentation that their tech stacks are conservative, or even dated; it's not a given that their work is solid and they're hard at work solving business problems given numerous constraints and office politics. Efforts to define this population by their rejection of shiny hype just perpetuates a kind of fictitious class divide between "fancy" developers and "plain" developers, when the real class divide is between management that is desperate for results, and IT workers that are desperate for empowered decision-making and resources. Businesses are under tremendous pressure, and silver bullets read about elsewhere carry great appeal. Transplanted organically by enthusiastic developers or by order of management, such solutions rarely work, because changing just a few inputs of a complex process won't deterministically give a better result. And mediocre results of a messy process make for a different genre of writing.
Maybe there's a class divide after all: between developers who are privileged enough to cook up all sorts of clever, custom solutions to challenging problems and can write about it, and those who spend their whole workday surviving the onslaught of nonsensical demands and deliver something mostly working in the end.
It's nice to recognize there exist developers who seem to stand apart from the vocal ones who make these posts, but they're not a single class. Some brag just as much, just in different circles. Some don't brag, but they do lots of good work. Some put out work that's not so good, and they may or may seek to represent their accomplishment regardless. The only factor they clearly share is their underrepresentation and their lack of attained popularity in talking about their work on social media.
As tempting as it may be, it's a big reach to conclude due to their underrepresentation that their tech stacks are conservative, or even dated; it's not a given that their work is solid and they're hard at work solving business problems given numerous constraints and office politics. Efforts to define this population by their rejection of shiny hype just perpetuates a kind of fictitious class divide between "fancy" developers and "plain" developers, when the real class divide is between management that is desperate for results, and IT workers that are desperate for empowered decision-making and resources. Businesses are under tremendous pressure, and silver bullets read about elsewhere carry great appeal. Transplanted organically by enthusiastic developers or by order of management, such solutions rarely work, because changing just a few inputs of a complex process won't deterministically give a better result. And mediocre results of a messy process make for a different genre of writing.
Maybe there's a class divide after all: between developers who are privileged enough to cook up all sorts of clever, custom solutions to challenging problems and can write about it, and those who spend their whole workday surviving the onslaught of nonsensical demands and deliver something mostly working in the end.